How to remove your grass for a raised bed garden in Texas - during the winter months.

What an exciting time! You are planning your spring garden and you want to build a new raised bed - or expand an existing one - and there’s something in the way. It’s called a lawn. Oh boy, we love ‘em. They keep the dirt out of the house, they reduce erosion, can be soft on the bare feet, but they totally cramp a home vegetable garden’s style. We need to remove it! #growfoodnotlawns, right??

But without the use of scorching heat to kill the turf, because, you know, it’s winter and all, what can we do? Here are some ideas.

Spray 20% vinegar.

The vinegar you find at your grocery market is normally 5%. Sometimes you can find 10% strength. You can boil this down, doing simple math as it reduces to create your own 20% at home. Or a simpler approach is to find a quality garden center where they should keep it in stock. If you add a dash of a grease removing soap, such as Dawn, it can improve the effectiveness by sticking on the leaves. With this approach, you will use a pump sprayer or hand sprayer to spray the tops of the leaves with your vinegar/soap mix. This will kill the leaves of your grass. This approach works best in full sun on a day that isn’t windy. The temps only have to be in the low 60s for this approach to work, so on most Texas winter days, especially closer to spring, this is a totally viable option! One of the pros is it’s a less-labor-intensive approach and it’s natural and non-toxic, so your garden, and Mother Earth is protected. The downside to this approach is that it normally will take multiple applications and it does not kill the roots. It will stress out the plants and cause a lot of damage, but total, permanent removal does not occur. And if you have an invasive weed such as bermudagrass, this just will be a constant losing battle.

Cardboard.

Finally you can put all those cardboard boxes from your pandemic online purchases to use! Mark out the area on your lawn you plan to put your raised bed and scalp the grass down to the dirt with a string trimmer. I recommend placing the cardboard 6-12 inches larger than the garden space you we planning; better too big than too small, especially since your grass is likely dormant right now and will have zero issues filling itself in come springtime. Breakdown your cardboard boxes and remove as much tape and other inorganic pieces from the cardboard. Soak both sides of the cardboard with your hose and place them 1-3 layers thick on top of the grass area you want to kill. You can weigh them down with rocks, or better yet, a wood chip mulch. It takes about 3-6 months for the cardboard to totally breakdown. You can place your raised bed right on top of it! By the time the cardboard breaks down, your grass and weeds should be dead and your rooted garden veggies will have a little extra carbon feeding them!

Sod cutter machine.

This machine is huge. And heavy. It’s pushed like a lawn mower and runs across the top of your grass, taking off the first inch or two of soil, which will remove all the leaves and most of the roots from your turf. You can rent one for about $100/day from most major tool rental stores. This is a great method if you have a large area to remove. And since it takes off the top layer of dirt, you may need to backfill the area before you lay down your bed. This method, combined with hand-removal of roots, and maybe even a layer (or three!) of cardboard will work best if you have a very thick, established bermudagrass area needing removal. That grass is tough. If you are a DIY’er looking for something to pay someone else to do, this is a good option. A landscaper (that uses this machine) can make quick work of a large area and it’s done.

Hand removal.

If your lawn isn’t too thick or established, or it’s mostly weeds, this can be a viable option. For the individual weeds, just soak the dirt and hand-pull from the roots. A tool called a soil ripper, cultivator or hand-tiller can be used to loosed up the ground around the weed so it easily comes out. For areas of turf grass sod, use a flat end shovel to cut 1-2 foot squares and shovel them out. This is best done when the dirt is very moist, so plan to soak it with hose water if it hasn’t rained lately. This option can be quite back-breaking in a short time and 2 hours goes by fast. You can also use a hand rake to hand-pull up as many weeds as possible and, as with the Sod Cutter, you may need to backfill the area with some topsoil or compost if the ground grades too deep.

Once you place your sturdy raised bed and 10+ inches of quality soil on top, the grass underneath should be either totally gone, or weakened enough that it’ll be a non-issue in your garden, especially if you keep up with it. Remember to pull out grass leaves quickly if you see them to keep their roots from strengthening and spreading. We highly recommend you add a decorative, non-grass boarder of at least 2 feet wide around your raised beds. This will keep the grass from creeping up to your bed and keep you from flinging grass into your bed with a string trimmer. It also makes barefoot gardening pure joy!

For the first 1-2 years in your garden, keep a jug of 20% vinegar ready for the daring sprouts that creep in and fry ‘em when they do. Eventually the grass will be less and less a problem. (And inversely, if you do NOT “fry ‘em when they do,” you will find them strengthening and may take over - don’t let that happen!)

And if this all this seems like a big chore - you are not wrong, it totally is! Some folks love a good garden chore. If you’d like less hard labor and more garden, contact me and we’ll set you up with a garden start-to-finish, killing the grass with all your beautiful plants installed - DONE. No problem!

Happy growing!